Drive-thru coffee franchise Ziggi’s Coffee is making moves at the leadership level, hiring former Duck Donuts CEO Betsy Hamm and Darren Spicer, the founder and former CEO of Clutch Coffee Bar. With large-scale growth on the horizon, Ziggi’s CEO Brandon Knudsen lauds the additions as crucial for the brand’s national expansion efforts.
When Betsy Hamm looked back at her varied career in franchising, she noticed a recurring theme: her love for founder-led brands.
Hamm joined the Duck Donuts marketing team in 2016 and became chief operating officer a year later until 2021, when the brand elevated her as its CEO. In her eight years with the brand, including four as CEO, Duck Donuts scaled tenfold from 20 units to nearly 200.
Now the fractional chief operating officer at 117-unit Ziggi’s Coffee, Hamm’s franchise experiences are informing her approach to refining the drive-thru coffee concept’s operational plans.
Betsy Hamm joined Ziggi’s Coffee in February as a fractional chief operating officer.
Or, as she put more succinctly, “I’ve been through this.”
“I understand those growing pains as you go through these different levels and have a certain amount of locations open,” Hamm said. “Being able to come in with that experience of having lived through a lot of it with the battle scars to show it, I’m hoping to help them be able to scale more efficiently.”
Hamm joined Ziggi’s in February, a key hire alongside Clutch Coffee Bar founder and former CEO Darren Spicer, who joined the brand in a consulting role. She said Ziggi’s fit the bill for where she wanted to apply her skills next. (Hamm also launched a podcast last year and runs a freelance consulting business with a heavy emphasis on platforming women in leadership.)
Ziggi’s recent hires are indicative of where the brand’s headed development-wise, CEO and co-founder Brandon Knudsen said.
“[Hamm] brings so much to the table,” Knudsen said. “She’s been the CEO of a brand with 200 stores. She knows what’s around the bend, and she’s very organized and structured. … As we look ahead, I’ve got to have some more people around me that are really focused on structure and numbers and setting goals for our team.”
Knudsen isn’t shy about hyping up his staff and sees Hamm and Spicer as strong inclusions more than two decades into creating and leading the company alongside his wife, Camrin.
Brandon Knudsen is the CEO and co-founder of Ziggi’s Coffee.
Ziggi’s has only gotten more aggressive as the brand transitions from a regional presence to a national one. The company grew from 78 units to 100 in 2024, according to its franchise disclosure document, and development for a 50-unit deal in the Atlanta metro—its largest franchise agreement yet—kicked off the same year.
Ziggi’s FDD reported a net gain of 15 units last year, and Knudsen expects that number to be about the same by the end of this year. The company has larger development goals in 2027, targeting upward of 35 openings.
With larger goals in the pipeline, Hamm has plans to fine-tune operational basics in training, marketing efforts and customer and employee experiences. Staying true to Ziggi’s culture-forward foundation is a nonnegotiable with these changes, she said.
With a stronger sense of brand clarity, positive momentum should continue into the rest of 2026 and beyond, said Hamm, who’s already seeing “some little wins” with franchisee profitability and improved operations early in her tenure.
“They have a lot of those pieces there, and I took some of their work and tried to bring a different perspective to what they’ve already done,” she said. “They’ve done all the hard work. They have the research. They have that deep knowledge of the brand, so I’ve been working really closely with the leadership team on getting clear on that and refining it.”
